Solaris Management Console (Overview)

The following sections provide information about the Solaris Manager
Console.

What Is the Solaris Management Console?

The Solaris Management Console is a container for
GUI-based management tools that are stored in collections referred to as toolboxes.

The console includes a default toolbox with many basic management tools,
including tools for managing the following:

Users

Projects

cron jobs for mounting and sharing file
systems

cron jobs for managing disks and serial
ports

For a brief description of each Solaris management tool, see Table 2–1.

You can add tools to the existing toolbox, or you can create new toolboxes.

The Solaris Management Console has three primary components:

The Solaris Management Console client

Called the console, this component is the visible
interface and contains the GUI tools used to perform management tasks.

The Solaris Management Console server

This component is located either on the same machine as the console
or remotely. This component provides all the back-end functionality
that allows management through the console.

The Solaris Management Console toolbox
editor

This application, which looks similar to the
console, is used to add or modify toolboxes, to add tools to a toolbox, or
to extend the scope of a toolbox. For example, you could add a toolbox to
manage a name service domain.

The default toolbox is visible when you start the console.

Solaris Management Console Tools

This table describes the tools included in
the default Solaris Management Console toolbox. Cross-references to background
information for each tool are provided.

Table 2–1 Solaris Management Console
Tool Suite

Category

Tool

Description

For More Information

System Status

System Information

Monitors and manages system information such as date, time, and time
zone

Context–sensitive help is available after you start a tool. For
broader, more in-depth online information than the context help provides,
see the expanded help topics. You can access these help topics from the console
Help menu.

Why Use the Solaris Management Console?

The console provides a set of tools with
many benefits for administrators.

The console does the following:

Supports all experience levels

Inexperienced administrators can complete tasks by using the GUI, which
includes dialog boxes, wizards, and context help. Experienced administrators
find that the console provides a convenient, secure alternative to using vi to manage hundreds of configuration parameters spread across
dozens or hundreds of systems.

The key benefit of RBAC is that roles can be limited
so that users have access to only those tasks that are necessary for doing
their jobs. RBAC is not required for using the Solaris
management tools. You can run all tools as superuser without making any changes.

Provides a command line interface

If preferred, administrators can operate the Solaris management tools
through a command-line interface (CLI). Some commands are written specifically
to mimic the GUI tool functions, such as the commands for managing users.
These new commands are listed in Table 1–6, which includes the names and brief descriptions of each command.
There is also a man page for each command.

For Solaris management
tools that have no special commands, such as the Mounts and Shares tool, use
the standard UNIX commands.

Organization of the Solaris Management Console

In the following figure, the console is shown with the Users tool open.

Figure 2–1 Solaris Management Console – Users
Tool

The main part of the console consists of three panes:

Navigation pane (at the
left) – For accessing tools (or sets of tools), folders, or other toolboxes.
Icons in the navigation pane are called nodes and are expandable if they are folders
or toolboxes.

View pane (at the right) –
For viewing information related to the node selected in the navigation pane.
The view pane shows either the contents of the selected folder, subordinate
tools, or the data associated with the selected tool.

Information pane (at the
bottom) – For displaying context-sensitive help or console events.

Changing the Solaris Management Console Window

The layout of the console window is highly configurable. You can use
the following features to change the console window layout:

View menu – Use the
Show option in the View menu to hide or display the optional bars and panes.
The other options in the View menu control the display of nodes in the view
pane.

Console menu – Use
the Preferences option to set the following: the initial toolbox, the orientation
of panes, clicking or double-clicking for selection, text or icons in the
tool bar, fonts, default tool loading, authentication prompts, and advanced
logins.

Context Help or Console Events toggles –
Use the icons at the bottom of the information pane to toggle between the
display of context-sensitive help and console events.

Solaris Management Console Documentation

The main source of documentation for using the console and its tools
is the online help system. Two forms of online help are available: context-sensitive
help and expanded help topics.

Context-sensitive help responds to
your use of the console tools.

Clicking the cursor
on tabs, entry fields, radio buttons, and so forth, causes the appropriate
help to appear in the Information pane. You can close, or reopen the Information
pane by clicking the question mark button on dialog boxes and wizards.

Expanded help topics are available
from the Help menu or by clicking cross reference links in some context-sensitive
help.

These topics appear in a separate viewer and
contain more in-depth information than is provided by the context help. Topics
include overviews of each tool, explanations of how each tool works, files
used by a specific tool, and troubleshooting.

How Much Role-Based Access Control?

As described in Why Use the Solaris Management Console?, a major advantage of using the Solaris management tools
is the ability to use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC provides administrators
with access to just the tools and commands they need to perform their jobs.

Depending on your security needs, you can use varying degrees of RBAC.

RBAC Approach

Description

For More Information

No RBAC

Allows you to perform all tasks as superuser. You can log in as yourself.
When you select a Solaris management tool, you specify root as
the user and the root password.

Uses three roles that are easily configured: Primary Administrator,
System Administrator, and Operator. These roles are appropriate for organizations
with administrators at different levels of responsibility whose job capabilities
roughly fit the suggested roles.